engagement model

technology

The Client

The client is an elementary teachers’ and education professionals’ organization. It provides information about the Canadian educational system and allows communication between teachers and other education representatives. The organization targets not only teachers but also parents and students who are interested in such information.

The Project

Melon began working for the client after winning their request for proposal. The project consists of three phases and we’ve just released the first one. The next two are the development of an extranet and intranet websites for the organization. Previously, the client’s website was using SharePoint 2007, however it wasn’t developed to support a lot of users. Their website has around 70,000 users monthly. Therefore, Melon developed a public website leveraging SharePoint On-Premise 2013. Throughout the process, our team developed a tool which eased the migration from SharePoint 2007 to 2013. We also structured their data for better search optimization.

The Process

Melon’s team started the project from scratch. We gathered the requirements, created the UX/UI and visual design concept and delivered the required piece of software. The major part of the work was the migration from SharePoint 2007 to 2013. Meanwhile, Melon’s UI/UX and visual design team has won over the client’s heart.

The website mainly serves as a source of information, but also as a link between the members of the organization and the public education figures. It allows users to browse through articles and if they have a feedback or suggestions, they can open a form, fill it in and send it to a certain figure in the Canadian education system.

Melon’s end product is a responsive website which supports a huge amount of traffic generated by tens of thousands of users. The website is already live and our client – very pleased with the result.

Challenges

The form that gathers the contact information about the users was tricky. The knotty part is that this type of information must be private and SharePoint is not the friendliest framework for public websites. To achieve the anonymous user access we put a lot of effort. Now we gather information about the users and send it to a special distribution group that is responsible for integrating the data into a CRM. The next step is to make this process automatic.

The migration of SharePoint 2007 to 2013 was another challenging moment because we had to create a public website with private information about the users. Melon developed a tool to optimize the effectiveness of the migration, which facilitated the team’s work.